


next thing you know, they’ll be changing the color of bread

by shaketheuniverse



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Lance works at a coffee shop, M/M, Mentions of Blood, Murder, he's also stabbed, hunk and pidge work at a museum n it's cute, hunk pidge and lance all went to art school, like color field n shit, mentions of weird art styles, mirror heels, this is my first piece n it's v bad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-15 08:21:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13609371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaketheuniverse/pseuds/shaketheuniverse
Summary: Lance almost snorts. He almost asks Hunk if this is serious. He almost slaps Pidge. He almost does a lot of things. However, Lance is the one in a hospital bed after a stabbing incident, and if the legendary Keith Kogane is gonna be the one to find out who did it, then Lance is gonna go with it as snarkily and flirtatiously as he can.





	1. stabby stabby

**Author's Note:**

> the title is a reference to one of my favorite poems of all time, "Margaret, are you drug?" by George Starbuck. also i don't really know how this site works so formatting is gonna be like 0/10 and i'm a shit writer so that's like -23/10 but enjoy

There’s someone behind him. He knows this. It’s nearly midnight, and Lance is walking his dog because he forgot to earlier, and he knows that if he had just brought his phone he wouldn’t be stuck perpetually increasing in pace with every left step. God, Baby Boomers don’t know the effect their whole anti-phone campaign has until someone like Lance is killed.

That’s an exaggeration. Lance is still alive. He’s still moving intensely, thinking if he can only get to the next convenience store or the next street corner or bus stop or pay-phone or whatever, he’ll be fine. And someone’s still behind him.

Their steps almost match now. When Lance speeds up, so does the person. Two sets of feet, clicking and echoing on the street, one after the other. Then, the footsteps stop. The echo becomes emptier and Lance doesn’t even notice that he’s stopped until his dog pulls at the leash and jerks him back into motion. Realizing what he’s done, Lance picks up the pace and starts to walk again.

Then, there’s a knife in his side. Knife in his side, scarf in his mouth, and footsteps are running down the street. He’s losing it, he’s losing it, he’s going crazy.

Lights out.

When he blinks awake, his side hurts like hell, his friends are asleep in the chairs next to him, and a nurse is looking down at him. Hospital, he realizes. He’s in a hospital.

“Pidge? Hunk?” he mutters. His voice is gravelly and weird, and it makes him uneasy.

“Lance?” Pidge stirs, looking up at her friend. Her eyes widen. “Hunk! Lance is awake!”

“Why does my side hurt so much?” Lance groans. It feels like someone had stabbed him and then sprinkled salt and lemon in the wound.

“You didn’t get home after twenty minutes, so Hunk and I called your phone and discovered it on the counter. We ran out and,” Pidge pauses to catch her breath. 

“We found you bleeding out on the street. It was everywhere, Lance. Your blood was everywhere. I called 9-1-1 as fast as possible while Pidge tried to stop the bleeding. It was God-awful,” Hunk finishes, seemingly more awake now than he was when Pidge began.

“We’ve been talking to the police, and they say they want to ask you a few questions. They feel like it may be a failed murder attempt or something. Oh! And you’ll never guess who the main detective is,” Pidge rambles, warm and light-hearted. Lance finds himself thankful that she hasn’t let a stabbing change her joking nature.

“Who has made you happy about my near-death, Pidge?” Lance laughs, stopping when he feels his stitches (or what he assumes to be stitches) contract.

Someone in the doorway clears his throat. “Hey.”

Lance almost snorts. He almost asks Hunk if this is serious. He almost slaps Pidge. He almost does a lot of things. However, Lance is the one in a hospital bed after a stabbing incident, and if the legendary Keith Kogane is gonna be the one to find out who did it, then Lance is gonna go with it as snarkily and flirtatiously as he can.

“Keith Kogane,” Lance drawls, stringing each syllable along as if he was knitting the world’s longest scarf using only one spool of yarn.

“Lance,” Keith replies, short and sweet. 

“Funny seeing you around these parts,” Lance smiles, for it’s a joke, but it’s as bittersweet as a joke can be. When they parted ways after high school, Lance really didn’t want to see Keith again. He was ready to move on with life after the Garrison.

“Well, you’re the one who got stabbed.”

“Fair enough.”

The silence is uncomfortable and unwanted, and Lance is eyeing the one window in the room as if it’s an escape route. Somehow in that exchange, his roommates slipped away.

“I’ve got a set of questions to ask y-”

“Oh, yeah, totally, go ahead,” Lance stammers because let’s face it, the previous conversation wasn’t going anywhere.

“So, tell me what happened,” Keith states, and Lance begins his story.

“Well, it was like, midnight maybe. Hunk, Pidge, and I have this secret dog named Bee that we took in off the streets. We aren’t allowed pets with fur, but we’re like the ninjas of cleaning dog hair by now. But anyways, he was about to pee on the carpet and as someone who would rather not have urine-scented carpet, I decided to take him for a walk. 

“After like, a block, I heard footsteps behind me. Didn’t look back, just kind of picked up the pace. But soon the guy starts moving faster with me until our paces match. Then he just stops. And I stop to let Bee pee. She pulls on the leash, I start walking again, and then there’s just this awful, awful pain below my rib cage. Before I could scream or anything, this guy’s shoving a scarf or something in my mouth and then-” what comes next, Lance? What do you think is next?

“Lance, is that when you blacked out?” asks Keith, gentle and calming and everything Lance doesn’t deserve.

“I don’t know. I guess. I remember - the guy’s shoes. They were heels. Mirror heels. Only found at that modern art coffee shop downtown because Allura has the patent out until 2032,” Lance replies, remembering how the shoes seemed to blend with the sidewalk as the guy ran away, reflecting a beam of streetlamp back at him. 

“Alright. Just to clarify, you’re talking about Allura Brooks, correct?”

“Yeah. Allura Brooks. The coffee shop is called Rite of Spring,” Lance elaborates, just in case it helps Keith out.

“Great. I’ll run this to my captain and see if he’ll let me take your case,” Keith smiles reassuringly. It’s times like these that Lance wishes he had bled out on the street.

“Maybe after you take my case, you can take me out,” he flirts instead, watching as Keith rolls his eyes and struts out of the room. Alone with his thoughts, Lance settles into a comfortable, i’ll-be-here-for-awhile-might-as-well-nap slumber, the beeps of machines luring him into peace.


	2. this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance is 17, and his girlfriend is awful to him because she thinks he likes it.
> 
> There's a screaming match, some knifeplay, and some mentions of scars and kinks.

He’s seventeen again, and he’s dating a nineteen year old girl named Gwen. Gwen is pretty and she’s nice and she gets him what he wants when he wants it. Gwen is cool. She’s just a bit sadistic.

Lance wants to be into it. He does. He really, really likes Gwen, and he doesn’t want to lose her because he isn’t as sexually adventurous as her. But her version of sexually adventurous is using knives and ropes and safe-words he can’t say because he doesn’t want to be a wimp or a pussy whore boy or whatever she may call him.

Lance is seventeen, he’s dating a college girl, and he wants out.

On the seventeenth of March, someone shows up.

There’s a carving on his ass; it reads “slut”, and all over his body, there are scars made from a whip, but these are minor details. What he’s truly concerned about are the slap marks on his face, reddened and obvious. He ran out of concealer because he’s unlucky, and he needs to buy more at the local drug store.

“Lance?” someone says. He swears under his breath, but pulls up his hood as to shadow his face before turning around..

“Hey, what’s up?” he smiles then, turning to face the one, the only, Keith Kogane. His rival.

“Why are you running around so early?” Keith asks.

Lance chuckles in slight relief and slight anxiety. “I slept over at my girlfriend’s.”

Shit. Keith’s looking closer at Lance. His eyes are interrogating him without interrogating him. “What happened to you?”

Lance intends to tell the truth. In the moment, right there, he wants to tell him everything. He wants Keith to hold him and tell him he doesn’t have to do this. He wants Keith to promise him things he doesn’t deserve. He wants to be honest; for once, he wants to be honest.

Honesty, however, is a much simpler thing to say than do.

“Some guys beat me up. That’s all,” he shrugs it off.

“You should go file a report to the police!” Keith exclaims, suddenly angry.

“If I only had the time,” Lance says in a musing tone, toying with the thought and wishing he could act on it.

“Make time!” the smaller boy shouts.

“It doesn’t work that way!” now they’re both shouting. Those poor people in the nearby apartments. There are many horrible ways to wake up, but to two teenage boys screaming? That must be the worst.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“It’s none of your fucking business!”

Except it should be Keith’s business. He wishes it was Keith’s business. Hell, he wishes anyone knew, but everyone’s too busy and too unfocused to notice that he dropped swim and hasn’t been to the beach in three months despite loving it with all his heart. Everyone’s studying for finals and working on their futures, and Lance is smoking pot with a college girl to numb himself so that maybe, maybe he’ll sleep through the sadism. Everyone’s doing their own thing, and no one has noticed that something’s wrong until today.

“Dude, are you crying?” Keith mutters, quiet and confused.

“Shit, sorry. Zoned out a bit,” Lance picks up, chuckling lightly in order to avoid suspicion. Follow the plan, it exists for a reason, chuckle and move on.

“Look, Lance, if I triggered anything, I really didn’t mean t-”

“No, no, I’m totally fine. Hey, catch ya later, right?” he smiles, turning around and walking backwards.

“Sure?” Keith smiles back, and seemingly satisfied with this, the taller of the two turns and jogs away, waving his arm in farewell.

 

* * *

 

The next time Keith catches him early in the morning, it’s at the local pool.

Keith doesn’t swim. He was never able to get into it as a kid, and now that he’s eighteen, he’s decided to at least learn how to. So here he is, at five a.m. on a Saturday morning in June, standing in the pool locker room in an attempt to hype himself up. At last, probably around five thirty, he walks into the room stained with the scent of chlorine to see a boy with flowers and insults carved into his skin. Wait, he knows that boy.

“Lance?”

The boy looks up, and there are those damn eyes, five o'clock sky blue. They’re wide in fear and realization, and Keith will go before a judge to say that he’s never seen anyone swim faster or get out of a pool faster than Lance does.

“Lance, wait!” he shouts, catching the boy as he slips because your mama was right when she said don’t run near a pool.

“Hey! Keith old friend! What’s it been, like, since Tuesday?” Lance laughs.

“Cut the shit, man. What are those scars from?” Keith interrogates.

“Nothing. I fell, okay?”

“They’re in the shape of flowers! You don’t get flower shaped scars from falling! And the word whore doesn’t just carve itself into you!” he’s shouting, loud and obvious.

“Look, let it go. I did,” Lance yells back, finally finding his footing and standing on his own.

“I’m not going to just let it go! You were hurt! Aren’t we friends?” Keith hollers, or maybe he’s speaking normally. The echo in the poolroom is truly phenomenal.

“We are friends!”

“Then prove it!”

For some reason or another, Lance pushes him into a pool. Shallow end, but Keith still finds himself floundering around and flailing his arms wildly in an entirely overdramatic way.

“Stand up! Keith, stand up!” the dryer boy exclaims, but when Keith doesn’t do so, Lance jumps in himself and lifts the boy up.

“I can’t...fucking...swim…” Keith breathes, clearly trying to take in all the air he can.

“Jesus, sorry man. I didn’t know. Like, really,” Lance explains, placing Keith back on his feet. The pool’s only four feet deep, and even Pidge could stand in it.

“No issue. You saved me, right?” Keith coughs.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” Lance smiles good naturedly, and Keith forgets about the blossoms and bad words and all he sees are those eyes, those goddamn five o’clock, just before sunset, sky blue eyes.

But the scars are still there, looping words and flower petals. And when Keith reaches out to hug him, they bite at him, taunting him that he’ll never know the truth.

Little does he know that they bite at Lance now, years later, because those swirls and scars bring him back to all the people who he wronged and all the people who definitely, definitely wouldn’t mind stabbing him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so like this was a concept I was toying with and I like it so basically like this chapter was some background knowledge about Lance and Keith and their history with each other.
> 
> It was ~really bad~.
> 
> anyways look at those fuckin,,, clues!!!


End file.
